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Career Transition research started in the early sixties focusing on sports retirement (Mihovilovic, 1964) and expanded later approaching other transitions such as the Junior To Senior transition (JTS; Pummell et al., 2004). Sport psychology research borrowed the term transitions from Nancy Schlossberg (1981) and Wylleman et al. (2004) expanded the term to include a distinction between normative and nonnormative transitions, recently updated with the inclusion of quasi-normative transitions (Stambulova et al., 2020). While this classification has been a guiding principle for research in career transitions during decades, contributing enormously to the development of knowledge on the field, it drags a conceptual imprecision. It is perfect to retrospectively analyse transitions, but from a prospective standpoint, before facing the process, can be perceived as limiting. During this keynote we will revisit the classification of career transitions identifying them based on their dimensions of specificity and predictability. We will present: (a) specific and predictable transitions such as retirement, JTS, secondary education to university or paternity and parenthood; (b) predictable and global transitions such as migration, transnationalism, club loan or pregnancy; (c) specific and unpredictable such as acute injuries or the disruption of the Olympic cycle; and (d) unpredictable and global such as a pandemic or a war outbreak. Based on this classification we will reflect on the psychological implications of defining transitions as ‘successful’ or ‘unsuccessful’ from a retrospective perspective proposing a more rational approach to defining them as either ‘adaptative’ or ‘nonadaptative’ both from prospective and retrospective views.
